All this Julian confided later in the same day to Horace Hubbard and Senator Baxter T. Busby, known within the Shelley Society as Five-Four, a class number that made him the man who had tapped Horace, Five-Five, in the autumn of the latter’s junior year at Yale. Actually Horace was the older by a couple of years, but he had left Yale as a sophomore in 1951 to fight in Korea as a Marine, and returned two years later after being discharged early because of wounds. The three Shelleyans were seated on facing stone benches in the Hubbard burial ground at the Harbor. Julian had flown up to this meeting in the Berkshires from Washington in his airplane, and Busby had driven up alone from New York City after lunch with a constituent. Horace was already there because he had been living in seclusion at the Hubbard country house with Rose MacKenzie ever since John L. S. McGraw had brought them back from aboard the Caroline. The benches on which they huddled were at the exact center of the burial ground, with headstones all around in concentric circles, one circle for each generation of Hubbards and Christophers. The same Christian names were carved into the various ranks of stones. In every generation born before the Second World War, when the two families had stopped intermarrying because they produced only boys—Zarah had been the first girl born into either branch in three generations—there was a Hubbard whose given name was Christopher and a Christopher whose first name was Hubbard.
Buzzer Busby listened intently to Julian’s story. He was here first of all, of course, because he was a Shelleyan, but he was also, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, going to be a key figure in Lockwood’s trial before the Senate. In this sense he was the most relevant member of the Shelley Society now alive.
“Did you expect Lockwood to reject your resignation?” Busby asked.
The answer was yes, but Julian could not confess the inmost truth of this matter even to a fellow Shelleyan, so he replied, “Not really, though it wouldn’t have surprised me. What I wanted to do was to force the issue—force him into making his choice.”
“What choice was that, exactly?”
“Well, he’s always had the choice between standing up for what was done in his name and in the name of what was right and necessary, and thereby keeping what he gained from it, or putting his fate and the fate of the Cause into the hands of his enemies.”
“May I ask what that has to do with choosing to let you go?”
“I gave the orders to do what was necessary so he wouldn’t have to give them, knowing it was what he wanted. If he repudiates me, he acknowledges that a wrong was done. He saves himself, and to hell with everything else.”
“ ‘Everything else’ being you and Horace?”
“We’re not things. By everything else I mean the Definition and the Duty. If Lockwood goes down—and I now think he will go down hard—the things we believe in go with him.”
“Ideas are not that easy to kill. Shelley had been dead for a hundred years when the Society was formed.”
“Granted. But this could set the Cause back another hundred years.”
Knowing this was true, Busby bit his lower lip with his perfect teeth and looked thoughtful. Horace had been silent throughout Julian’s speech. In the vale below—the burial ground was situated on a knoll that looked down on the many roofs of the Harbor—Rose MacKenzie and Emily were walking back and forth on the long western porch of the main house, hand in hand and deep in conversation. Horace supposed the women had much to talk about that only the two of them could understand, attached as they were to him and his half brother.
Julian said, “Speak up, Horace. What do you make of this?”
Horace shrugged. “I thought I had a deal in prospect with Olmedo, but it’s beginning to look like things aren’t going to work out after all.”
“What deal was that?” Busby asked.
Horace said, “I would confess all, take all the blame, sanitize the President over the election business, take my medicine, and everyone lives happily ever after.”
“And what would you have got in return?”
As amiable as ever, Horace said, “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. Immunity for Julian and Rose. No retaliation against FIS or its heirs or assigns.”
“Olmedo agreed to that?”
“He said he’d try to work it out.”
“With whom?”
“Lockwood, who said it was beyond his power. The Speaker of the House thought it was a fine idea. But Sam Clark put his hands over his ears like the Chinese monkey in the middle and looked horrified.”
“Olmedo told you all this?”
“Yes. He’s an honest broker.”
Busby said, “But not a realist if he went to Clark with this. The Sam Clark I know will never agree to anything like that, not in a million years.”
“You’re sure about Clark?”
Busby waved a hand at the circles of headstones. “Did these people hump each other on cold nights for three hundred years in order to produce you and Julian?” They all smiled at the joke. Busby said, “Or is there a kicker you haven’t mentioned, Horace?”
“Well, sort of,” Horace said. He told Busby in clinical detail about what he called the last days of Ibn Awad. This took a long while, and by the time Horace had finished the story, Busby’s open face was white with shock. In the moral order to which he subscribed, doing violence to a victim of imperialism was the worst of crimes, even if this particular one happened to be the richest oil sheik in the world. He stood up, walked among the sunken graves to the stone wall surrounding them, and looked off at the hemlock-blue hills in the near distance. The afternoon sun, which only a few minutes earlier had been unseasonably warm for Massachusetts in March, was now a heatless moonlike crescent going down through a bank of purple clouds.
Busby shivered. “Is what you’ve just told me true?” he asked. “Literally true?”
“What a question,” Horace said.
“But to suborn a son to kill his own father.”
“ ‘Suborn’ is hardly the word,” Julian said. There was a defensive tone in his voice; his brother’s ethics were being questioned. “All Horace did was make it possible for Prince Talil to do what he wanted to do. He thought his father was an incurable psychopath who was a danger to humanity, and that he himself might go crazy later on, as a matter of inheritance. To my way of thinking he was a selfless hero. Suppose someone like Horace had persuaded Raul Castro to do away with Fidel after the Bay of Pigs? No Vietnam, no LBJ, no Nixon, no Watergate, no Reagan. All Horace did was make his operation work.”
“With slightly different historical consequences,” Busby said. “Lockwood ordered this to be done—have I got that right?”
“Yes,” Julian said. “I was there. He said the word—reluctantly. Jack Philindros insisted on it. For once it wasn’t a case of sparing a President’s tender sensibilities.”
Busby took a deep breath, releasing it into the suddenly chilly air as a stream of vapor. “Well,” he said, “I guess we’d better start thinking in terms of alternatives.”
Julian nodded. Though his mind was busy, Horace said nothing. He was watching the women down below; they were now enfolded in each other’s arms. He heard Busby say, “Should someone be asked to get in touch with Six-Nine?” and then heard Julian reply, “No. Archimedes is going to need his credibility. He should be left out of this completely.”
Busby said, “Completely?”
“Well,” said Julian, “until the last ticktock.”
8
From hints and rumors and the law of Washington probabilities, and because Attenborough’s encounter with Slim had caused him to think in new ways about the Speaker’s habits and methods, Ross Macalaster had cobbled together a column for the Wednesday editions predicting that Attenborough would attempt to bring the question of impeachment before the full House of Representatives, bypassing the Judiciary Committee and circumventing the news media in a scheme designed to contain the damage to his party that would otherwise result from w
eeks of saturation coverage of committee hearings. Macalaster’s editors scoffed at this idea. How could any such maneuver be possible if they had not heard about it? But they published the article anyway.
Attenborough—who was, like most Washington figures, as keenly attuned to the op-ed pages of the Post, Times, and Wall Street Journal as were the wildebeest to ominous movements in the grasses of the African savannah—called him about his piece as soon as the first editions were delivered, just after dawn. Macalaster had not heard from him since he took him home from the emergency room three days before.
“I’m not confirming or denying a damn thing, Ross,” Attenborough said. “But did I mention something about this at your house or maybe in the car the other night?”
In the background of Attenborough’s call Macalaster could hear what sounded like running water, and he wondered if the Speaker was calling from his bathroom. He replied, “No, Mr. Speaker, not a word. It’s just a think piece, all guesswork and rumors.”
“Always said you were a smart son of a gun. No point in asking you which rumors, I suppose?”
Macalaster replied, “All I can tell you is that you yourself are completely innocent.”
“Glad to know that. But there’s got to be a guilty son of a bitch somewhere.” High officials of the government, from the President on down, were always trying to catch the leakers in their entourage, for the loose tongues of underlings were the curse of power. Few succeeded in unmasking the guilty, who were assiduously protected by journalists for the sake of the treacheries they might commit in the future. “Well, the hell with it, it’s all in a day’s work,” Attenborough said. He coughed spasmodically, then continued: “That was one hell of a party you gave the other night. Interesting bunch. Is our new Chief Justice an old friend of yours?”
The question interested Macalaster. “I’ve known him for a long time,” he said cautiously.
“Fellow Yalies?”
“I didn’t go to Yale. Why?”
“Just wondered. He’s a walking Old Blue alumni reunion and storefront lawyer to the world terrorist movement rolled up in one. I don’t think we’ve ever had a Chief Justice who was a whole hell of a lot like Mr. Hammett.”
“I don’t think so, either, Mr. Speaker.”
“You don’t? That’s mighty interesting … and Ross?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Thanks for being a good Samaritan when I hurt my hand the other night. You and that good-looking girl of yours went way above and beyond the call of duty to get me patched up like you did, and I won’t forget it.”
“She’s not my girl.”
“She’s not? Sorry to hear that for your sake. Must have ruined her dress, bleeding like I was. Not to mention your fine oriental rug. Send me the bills.”
“Forget it.”
Attenborough chuckled. “Easier said than done. There’s a fair amount of talk around town about me and that crazy female Hammett brought to the party. Any idea where the talk’s coming from?”
Though it had not yet broken into print or broadcast, the story of Attenborough’s brutish grope of a feminist ecolawyer, so far unidentified, had spread through Washington.
“No, not for sure,” Macalaster replied.
“You had any calls?”
“Half a dozen maybe. All from reporters.”
“What’d you tell ‘em?”
“That it was a social occasion, and therefore off the record. But they all had the details already. They were just looking for confirmation.”
“All the details?”
“Not the name of the hospital.”
“Anybody know that detail except the three of us?”
“Not from me. Or Zarah.”
Attenborough said, “I didn’t think so. The ones calling me up are mostly the kind of folks who admire the hell out of Hammett.”
“He’s your suspect?”
“Nobody else was there.”
“Except Slim.”
“Except who?”
“Your dinner partner.”
“Well, yeah, she was there, but she said she was from Massachusetts.” Attenborough pronounced the name of this commonwealth “Massatoosetts.”
“Connecticut,” Macalaster said.
“Well, one of those states up there in New England.” To Attenborough’s mind, this eliminated Slim as the culprit. She knew no one in town, therefore she did not exist for the media. Though he was not prepared to reinforce Attenborough’s suspicions, Macalaster knew that no one except Archimedes Hammett was likely to be the source of the stories. All the reporters who had called Macalaster were people who covered the Cause and identified with it in their minds and hearts. No one else at the dinner party had any motive to talk, and certainly none had Hammett’s credibility, his ready and willing network of gossips, or the ruthlessness to merchandise the story in the first place. What Hammett’s purposes might be in setting up this foolish old drunk, Macalaster could not guess, apart from his compulsive need to expose members of the Establishment as being just as vile and corrupt as the system that produced them.
Clearly Attenborough had figured out who his nemesis was, and this was the real reason for his phone call. “Well, the hell with it,” he said. “You thank Miss Christopher for me, Ross. She’s got Hammett’s number—wish that girl from Massatoosetts hadn’t interrupted her with all that racket before she really got his goat about Percy Bysshe Shelley.”
“You don’t trust Hammett?”
“Never said that. For all I know he’s a fine American you could trust with your wallet and your daughter—especially your daughter, from all I hear. But then, what does anybody really know about the son of a bitch except that he’s a friend of any poor suffering underdog that knows how to make a bomb out of fertilizer and diesel oil?”
Macalaster said, “Mr. Speaker, are you trying to tell me something?”
“Just passing the time of day, Ross. Well, keep on hound-doggin’. The
Lord loves a hound dog—Book of Matthew, chapter the seventh, verse the seventh.”
“I don’t quite recall that one off the top of my head, Mr. Speaker.”
“Look it up,” said Attenborough.
After they said goodbye, Macalaster got down the Bible and looked up the verse. It was one of the most famous passages in the New Testament: “ ‘Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.’ ”
What was Attenborough up to? Macalaster decided to go see him before the business day began. After dressing himself in the clothes he had worn the day before, skipping a shower and breakfast, leaving a note and a twenty-dollar bill for Manal on the refrigerator door, he shaved with an electric razor while driving through still-deserted downtown streets to Capitol Hill.
9
At their regular Odd Wednesday breakfast in the Speaker’s office, Sam Clark remarked on Attenborough’s sickly appearance. “Tucker, you’re looking a little peaked.”
“My malaria’s come back on me again,” Attenborough said.
The Speaker’s voice was hollow. Because of Dr. Chin’s lecture about cirrhosis of the liver, he had consumed no alcohol for five full days. His last drink had been the pint or so of vodka he had sneaked at Macalaster’s house before the disaster on Saturday night. He been unable to eat anything since then except for a little milk—drunk through a straw, out of the carton, so that he couldn’t see the milk. When he looked at food since he stopped drinking, it moved: a fried egg would slither across the china like a disembodied eye in a Terrytoon, or if it was something brown, like a steak, it steamed like feces. He didn’t know what was the matter with his mind, but he decided he’d better lay off eating until this problem passed. His one visible hand—he hid the injured one on his lap—shook so badly that he could not lift his coffee cup without causing it to rattle and spill.
Clark noted these signs of acute alcoholism without surprise. He had seen Attenborough’s malaria recur many times before. “Looks to me like it’s
worse, and coming back more often,” he said. “Maybe you ought to see a doctor.”
“No point in it,” Attenborough said. “When you get bit by a bad mosquito, you stay bit. Anyway, I got no time to spare for doctoring. We’re going to impeachment proceedings as soon as I can get it done.”
“How soon?”
“Next Monday. I’ll announce it Thursday.”
“Tomorrow? That’s quick.”
“Quick is the whole idea. Ross Macalaster has already figured out the plan. The rest of the media will copy him. Got to limit this damn thing and get it over with.”
“How are you going to do that, Tucker?”
Attenborough was feeling shaky, but he answered in his usual confident way. “By going back to the Andrew Johnson precedent. A resolution to impeach was introduced on Washington’s Birthday in 1868. The House took one day to think about it, then adopted the resolution two days later, and eleven articles of impeachment within a week or so.”
“What about the Judiciary Committee? They took months with Nixon.”
“And came up empty. I’m cutting ‘em out this time. In the Johnson case the Committee on Reconstruction did the work. This time it’ll be a Committee of Managers, with Bob Laval as chairman and six other lawyers tried and true.”
Laval was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, a flamboyant Louisianan famous for his vanity and changeable opinions. (As Lockwood had put it years before, “Bob Laval spelled backwards is Bob Laval.”) Clark said, “Laval accepts this?”
“Haven’t told him yet, but he’ll see the advantages,” Attenborough said. “Gives him the limelight and leaves the other forty lawyers on his committee in outer darkness. If we stick to the point and keep the issue simple, we can do it in two sessions, just like they did in 1868.”
“How long after that did it go to the Senate in the Johnson case?”
Attenborough had every pertinent fact memorized, but it took him a moment to find the date in his memory. Something was wrong here. “The Senate trial began March thirtieth,” he said after a short hesitation. “I hope you can do it quicker this time. You’ll have the whole package by the middle of next week.”
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